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Summary
Summary
A massive novel of World War II Los Angeles. The crowning work of an American master.
It is January, 1942. Torrential rainstorms hit L.A. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops rate it a routine dead-man job. They're grievously wrong. It's a summons to misalliance and all the spoils of a brand-new war.
Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, caught up in the maelstrom of the Japanese internment. Dudley Smith is an LAPD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way Fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core.
They've signed on for the dead-man job. They've got a hot date with History. They will fight their inner wars within The War with unstoppable fury.
Author Notes
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L. A. Quartet novels - "The Black Dahlia", "The Big Nowhere", "L. A. Confidential", & "White Jazz" - were international best-sellers. His novel "American Tabloid" was Time magazine's Novel of the Year for 1995; his memoir, "My Dark Places", was a "Time" Best Book of the Year & a "New Yorker Times" Notable Book for 1996. He lives in Kansas City.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
MWA Grand Master Ellroy's stunning sequel to 2014's Perfidia opens in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve 1941. Anti-Japanese hysteria has reached a fever pitch and shifting alliances of left-wing and right-wing groups struggle to work out the best way to profit off the war. Dudley Smith, a police sergeant, has taken an Army commission south of the border, ostensibly to thwart Fifth Column pro-Nazi subversives and suspected Japanese submarine encroachments in Baja, but in reality to set up a lucrative wartime business smuggling heroin and illegal immigrant labor. Meanwhile, the L.A. police uncover a body in Griffith Park. Brilliant forensics expert Hideo Ashida, assisted by a talented young scientist with secrets of her own, must grapple with his devotion to Smith and his own conscience as he begins to piece together an intricate story involving a decade-old gold heist and a lethal fire in the park. As Smith squares off against Bill Parker, an LAPD captain on the rise, things get complicated and ugly very quickly. Just when it seems that things couldn't get darker, Ellroy peels back a deeper level of corruption. This obsessive, wholly satisfying probing of 20th-century American history deserves a wide readership. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The second volume of Ellroy's second L.A. Quartet picks up where Perfidia (2014) left off, on New Year's Eve 1941, and begins a chaotic 1942 with a plot so convoluted readers will be grateful every time characters restate the facts. Elmer Jackson, Dudley Smith, Joan Conville, Hideo Ashida, and Kay Lake all reappear, along with a dizzying constellation of characters from other Ellroy novels and real life. The key cases are a 1931 gold heist, a 1933 Griffith Park brush fire, and a contemporary killing in which two bent cops are among three victims in a seedy party pad. Do they all connect? And, if so, how? As the characters work angles to seek gold, power, revenge, or even justice, alliances form, twist, and break against a backdrop of war profiteering and fifth-column activity. A deeper theme, utterly timely given the real-world rise of the strongman, is authoritarianism: swastika pins and uniform fetishes signal cabals of Nazis, Communists, and Sinarquistas (Mexican fascists). If, at some point, most of the characters seem to speak like Ellroy, or maybe his grandiloquent Smith, it's somehow appropriate, plunging us ever deeper into a fevered secret history that could have been dreamed by nobody else. Relentlessly compelling.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A 60,000-copy first printing in some ways belies intense media interest in Ellroy; his first novel in five years is a major literary event.--Keir Graff Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
the LOS angeles of James Ellroy's latest historical thriller, THIS storm (Knopf, $29.95), is the kind of place where rats as big as cats fearlessly scoot across the front porch, where lovers rendezvous in welcoming Tijuana, anonymous among the "child-beggar swarms" and "cat-meat taco vendors," and where sentiments of pure, undiluted venom ("Hate, hate, hate. Kill, kill, kill") express the prevailing state of race relations. We're talking about the Los Angeles of January 1942, when a New Year's Eve broadcast by Father Charles Coughlin laments that his warbattered listeners must stand shoulder to shoulder with the "rape-happy Russian Reds" in resistance to "the more sincerely simpático Nazis." In such a soul-crushing environment, a simple murder comes as a relief. Or so thinks Dudley Smith, a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, currently working for Army intelligence and devising all kinds of war-profiteering hustles on the side. Torrential rainstorms have unearthed a corpse, washed up in its very own pine box on a par-3 golf course - a "long-term decomp," in cop parlance, meaning the remains are sans flesh and all bones. By official guesstimate, man and box were burned in a fire, circa 1933. But the repercussions of the case will play out over the next several months. ("There was no better time to howl and throw parties.") For readers who keep track of these things, "This Storm" is the second volume, after "Perfidia," of Ellroy's Second L.A. Quartet. (For my money, the most notable novels in his great saga are "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential," the first and third books of The L.A. Quartet. But honestly, you can pick up the story anywhere.) Here the characters in those previous novels are younger and dangerously reckless. And this time we take a long look at Hideo Ashida, "crack forensic chemist and sly sleuth," who barely escapes internment by covering up a bookie racket: "Great shame undermines his great luck." Until it runs out, his luck is also ours: Of all the flawed characters caught up in the swirl of this epic novel, he's the guy with the most heart. if YOU'RE going to be bludgeoned to death with a bottle of wine, it might as well be a vintage with a certain cachet. In Anthony Horowitz's new mystery, the sentence IS DEATH (Harper, $27.99), a celebrity divorce lawyer named Richard Pryce is murdered with a 1982 bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, which is not too shabby. Classier still is the metafictional plot construction, which allows Horowitz-the-author to play Horowitz-the-character in his own novel. "I like to be in control of my books," he says, explaining why he has positioned himself as the lead detective's sidekick. The victim wasn't short of enemies. In one unseemly public display, a pretentious feminist author poured a glass of wine over his head and thus positioned herself as a suspect. But as the detective, Daniel Hawthorne, bluntly notes after the author has shared his own theories, "It was all too bloody obvious, mate." NOT HAVING aged in the past 20 years, Aimée Leduc, the heroine of MURDER IN BEL-AIR (Soho Crime, $27.95) and other Parisian mysteries by Cara Black, is quite capable of being the mother of a darling, almost-l-year-old child named Chloé. To be sure, time goes slowly in this captivating series and it's still only 1999. Aimée is still wearing high-fashion vintage clothing and scooting around on her pink Vespa while solving computer security breaches for Leduc Detective - and the odd murder case for her own satisfaction. Here Aimée's in Paris's 12th Arrondissement, not for the opera or for a stroll in the Bois de Vincennes, but to solve the murder of a homeless old woman. Aimée is also in search of her unpredictable American mother, Sydney, who has disappeared after failing to pick up Chloé from her playgroup in Bel-Air. Aimée doesn't need to pack heat on these adventures; the stiletto heels of her Louboutin ankle boots are weapon enough. But something more lethal is called for when Sydney's secretive work as a former C.I.A. operative comes to light, threatening not only Sydney and her professional contacts but also her family, including (gasp!) baby Chloé. DID martin walker really kill off that nice American art history student in the body in the castle WELL (Knopf, $25-95)? Yes, he did, which is very daring, considering that this is one of his charming mysteries set in the beautiful Périgord region of France and featuring his amiable sleuth, Bruno Courréges. Nice young women like Claudia Muller are rarely bumped off in nice country mysteries with nice local detectives, especially not detectives who take their horses and their truffle hounds into the woods for the sheer joy of it. But Walker knows exactly what he's doing in this series, which artfully seasons its plots with regional lore about the sport of falconry and with lessons in French history, particularly the World War II resistance - all while gently teasing the locals for indulging in "the French love of ceremony and dressing up." Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Guardian Review
The great stylist of US crime has a blast in wartime Los Angeles with a charming socialite, a charred body and some stolen gold James Ellroy is one of America's most important crime writers; This Storm is the second volume in a promised series of books that act as prequels to his first LA Quartet, which was set in the late 1940s and 50s and included his breakout novel LA Confidential . It starts two weeks after the events of 2014's Perfidia . That book began on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack and introduced us to Hideo Ashida, a brilliant LAPD forensic scientist working under the sinister Sergeant Dudley Smith. It's now New Year's Eve 1941: anti-Japanese paranoia is reaching its terrifying climax. President Roosevelt is only weeks away from issuing executive order 9066, deporting Japanese American citizens to internment camps; in this febrile atmosphere a charred body is found in Griffith Park that attracts Ashida's attention. Dudley Smith has joined the US Army, ostensibly to thwart fifth column activity in Mexico, but in reality to get control of the heroin trade. He obtains an army commission for Ashida, to prevent him being deported when the round-ups come. Ashida also gets a new assistant, Joan Conville, who figures out that the body in the park is connected to stolen gold, and along the way we meet again the charming socialite Kay Lake, the persistent Sergeant Elmer Jackson and the real life racist monster Father Charles Coughlin, while there's a rather unpleasant late cameo from Orson Welles. There are a dozen other main characters and at least three main stories that dovetail at the end: clearly Ellroy is having a blast using wartime LA as his playground, with Nazi sympathisers knocking about with other diabolical and cynical grotesques. Ellroy remains one of the most exciting literary stylists in the English language. If David Peace's iterative, repetitious, circular method lies at one end of the prose spectrum, Ellroy's dry, clipped, slangy, telegraphic style is its counterpoint: "Annie was gooooood. She laid on the gee-whiz ... The Vice squadroom was yawnsville. Elmer's cubicle cocooned him. He heard party sounds and extraneous voices. Annie laid dat voodoo on old Saul." It's been five years since the last novel from the self-described "Demon Dog" of American letters, but it's worth the wait. Like all good jazzmen, Ellroy works very hard indeed to make his music flow so easily.
Kirkus Review
Ellroy, master of California noir (Perfidia, 2014, etc.), serves up a heaping helping of mayhem in this second volume of his Second L.A. Quartet.If there's a constant in Ellroy's storytelling, apart from snappy prose, it's that there's a fine and often indistinguishable line between good guys and bad guys: His cops are dirty, his villains sometimes blessed with noble virtues. There's not much nobility in this new novel, though, which picks up after Pearl Harbor in the uneasy months when Nazis are floating around on the streets of Tijuana and LA, soldiers and sailors are battling zoot-suiters, Father Coughlin is sputtering anti-Semitic propaganda across the line on Mexican radio, and Japanese-Americans are being rounded up for internment. But even the beleaguered nisei take time to cast out a few slurs at the Chinese for whom they're confused, while the LA constabulary scours the streets. "How come we're not rousting the dagos and the Krauts?" wonders one, even as everyone avoids the elephant in the room, a shipment of gold that's gone missing. It being Ellroy, there are tangled storylines aplenty as well as a large dramatis personae, many of whom will be familiar to readers of Perfidia. About the best of them is the Japanese-American police investigator Hideo Ashida, who harbors no illusions about his clientele: "Lustful men and corrupt women. It was ghastly business." Lead player Elmer Jackson, a world-weary flatfoot, has his good points, too, but he'd rather be back in vice than on the Alien Squad, where it "was Japs twelve days a week." Mix in Mary Jane-dealing starlets, sleazy informants, synarchist gangsters, "cops in the Silver Shirts and German-American Bund," Orson Welles and Walter Pidgeon in a decidedly non-Hays Code film sequence, and a thousand other threads, and you've got a raucous tale that will likely leave you in need of a shower and a Disney film.A gritty, absorbing novel that proves once again that Ellroy is the rightful heir of Chandler, Cain, and Hammett. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Elmer Jackson (Los Angeles, 9:30 P.M., 12/31/41) Stakeout. It's a sit-and-wait job. Some hot-prowl burglar/rape-o's out creeping. He's Tommy Glennon, recent Quentin grad. He's notched five 459/sodomies since Pearl Harbor. Happy fucking New Year. Three-man stakeout. Two parked cars. 24th and Normandie. Sit and wait. Endure bugs-up-your-ass ennui. The rain. Plus war-blackout regulations. Drawn shades, doused streetlamps. Bum visibility. It's a stag hunt. The PD worked that way. Four victims mugshot-ID'd Tommy. The Chief and Dudley Smith conferred. They called it. Per always: perv shit on women mandates DEATH. Elmer gargled Old Crow. He had the front-house car. Mike Breuning and Dick Carlisle had the alley. Tommy had the crib cased. Two leggy sisters lived there. Lockstep surveillance locked down the gestalt. Central Burglary tailed Tommy a week running. Elmer moved the sisters out and moved his leggy girlfriend in. She had the legs and the stones for the job. Ellen Drew. His part -time girlfriend and part -time Paramount starlet. Ellen glommed raves in If I Were King and went pffft. She part- time whored for Elmer and his part -time girlfriend. Brenda Allen. Part -time squeeze of Chief Jack Horrall. It's who you know and who you blow. Call-Me-Jack set up the bait gig. Elmer scoped the house. Upstairs lights gleamed. Ellen cracked the shades to spotlight her gams. It violated blackout regs and lit her legs gooooood. Tommy G. was a leg man. Elmer read his Quentin file and glommed the gestalt. Thomas Malcolm Glennon/white male American/DOB 8/19/16. Preston Reform School and Quentin. Tight with pachucos and Four Families tong men. Fireworks popped somewhere north. The rain drenched the sparks and killed the effect. "It's who you know." Elmer knew Dudley and Call-Me-Jack. Thus, this shit job. Mike B. and Dick C. were Dudley's strongarm goons. Dud got the night off. Some unknown geek shivved him three days ago. Elmer yawned. Elmer futzed with his two-way radio. Police calls spritzed. Niggertown 211/Happytime Liquor/prowl cars at scene. Dope roust at Club Zombie. Mexi coon rumble, 84th and Avalon. Zoot-suit beaners ex -cape. Elmer yawned. Elmer skimmed the dial. He hit a civilian band and got lucky. The PD's New Year's bash warbled. It's live from City Hall. It features Count Basie's Band. The Detective Bureau muster room's rigged with radio mikes. The Count's at the keyboard. There's Lester Young's sax. Here's the inside tattle. Two bluesuits popped the Count with reefers. Jack Horrall caught wind and tossed the pitch. Your call, Count. Six months honor farm or a one-night engagement? Rain slammed the car. Said rain outslammed Count Basie. Elmer skimmed to Band 3. He caught an open line to Breuning and Carlisle. "Know" and "blow." Maladroit Mike and Dipshit Dick. This jive New Year's Eve. What good's your insider-cop status? He loved Headquarters Vice. It dispensed yuks and served to scotch his call-biz competiton. Then the fucking Japs bombed fucking Pearl Harbor and fucked the white world up the brown trail. He got detached to the Alien Squad. It was Japs twelve days a week. Japs, Japs, JAPS. Foreign-born, native-born, for sure and alleged Fifth Column. Raid their pads. Confiscate their goods. Transport them to ritzy horse stalls at Santa Anita. Band 3 popped sound. Breuning and Carlisle bullshitted. Who shivved the Dudster? Their rambunctious kids. This meter maid with jugs out to here. Breuning and Carlisle gassed. They hashed out the Fed's phone-tap probe. The PD was knee-deep in shit. It's a nail-biter. City Hall was bugged and tapped, floor-to-rafters. Rival cop factions spied on each other. Grifter cops, tonged-up cops, cop strikebreakers. The Feds took note and launched a probe. Cop fiefdoms. Cop thieves. Cops in the Silver Shirts and German-American Bund. Calls to the DA's Office. Calls to Mayor Fletch Bowron. Detective Bureau cops be scaaared. Elmer was scared. He ran a call-girl ring. He peddled flesh to the L.A. elite. He made biz calls from the Vice squadroom. The radio browned out. Shit--line crackle, static, hiss. Elmer twirled the dial. He caught some luck there. Good Lord--it's Cliffie Stone's Hometown Jamboree. It was auld lang syne for displaced crackers. That was him, defined. Cliffie connoted hayrides and moonshine. Cliffie brought back Wisharts, North Carolina. Wisharts was Klan Kountry. Geography is destiny. Klan life fucked up his daddy and big brother, Wayne Frank. That hate-the-jigs diet stuck in young Elmer's craw. He hit eighteen in '30. He joined the Marine Corps. Semper Fi: Parris Island, Camp Lejeune, Nicaragua. Man-o-Man Managua. The Marine detachment backstops puppet Führer Somoza. Jarheads snuff his political rivals and stand embassy guard. They're bellhops and part-time assassins. El Jefe loves Lance Corporal E. V. Jackson. Hence a plum job: run Jefe 's favorite whorehouse. He learned the biz that way. It spawned his notion of call-service-to-your-door girls. Jefe shot him Plum Job #2. He watchdogged the L.A. police chief. James Edgar "Two-Gun" Davis. One vivid lunatic. Davis and Jefe were sordid soul mates. They boozed and whored together. Davis loved Lance Corporal E. V. Jackson. Here's why: A leftist zealot charged Davis with a machete. Lance Corporal Jackson shot and killed him. Davis shot Lance Corporal Jackson a police department appointment. Good bye, Marine Corps. Hello, Los Angeles. Elmer liked police work. Davis set him up with a cooze pusher named Brenda Allen. Elmer and Brenda clicked. They concocted their phone-exchange biz and saw it flourish. The L.A. grand jury sacked Two-Gun Davis. He poked one Jailbait Jill too many and took it up the dirt road. Call-Me-Jack's in now. He's got 7% of the call biz. Sergeant E. V. Jackson is twenty-nine. He's one lucky white man. Cliffie Stone laid down hick ballads. That was Wayne Frank's mawkish meter. Wayne Frank was a hate dog and nativist nabob. Kid brother Elmer notched opportunities. Wayne Frank harvested shit. Wayne Frank goes Klan, goes rumdum, goes hobo. He habituates the West Coast and clocks an untimely end. Elmer gargled Old Crow. He was half-tanked. It was 10:18. Tommy G. always hit between 10:00 and midnight. The hick music rubbed him raw. He doused the radio and gassed on the rain. His prowl car was sunk fender-deep. He checked the house. Cracked blinds gave him a look-see. Ellen was upstairs. She was pacing and smoking. She provided a Leg Show De-luxe. Smoke plumes plumed out a transom slot. Elmer tuned in Band 3. Mike B. groused to Dick C. Dudster this, Dudster that. More drift per their rambunctious kids. More line fuzz and static. Elmer killed his jug and tossed it out the window. "Whoa, Junior" fuzzed in. Elmer grabbed the receiver and flipped the talk switch. The fuzz-static cleared. "Yeah, Mike." "Our boy's coming south. He hopped the next-door fence. You take the front. Let him sniff Ellen and start upstairs before you sh--" Elmer jumped. He shoved out the door. He puddle-leaped and lunged for the curb. His shoes squished and leaked. He pulled his piece and chambered a round. His hat flew off. The rain stung his eyes and ratched up his vision. He made the lawn/the front porch/the front door. It's unlocked. Go in slow now. You oiled the hinges and jambs. Tommy won't hear shit. He got inside. He smelled Ellen's cigarette smoke and perfume. He made for the stairway. He squished all over the living room rug. Mike and Dick squished toward him. They hit the stairway. Everybody went sssssshhh. They scoped Tommy's muddy footprints. They heard floorboard creaks and foot scuffs upstairs. Mike winked. Dick did that slice-the-throat thing. Elmer gulped-- mother dog, holy shit-- Ellen screamed. Mike whooped. Dick whooped. They ran upstairs and raised a ruckus. They bumped each other off the walls and hit the landing. Elmer heard front-widow glass shatter. Tommy pulled some human-fly stunt. Elmer ran back out the door. There's that black sky and sluice rain, there's half a glimpse. There's Human Fly Tommy, running northbound-- He's two front yards up. He's cutting toward the sidewalk. There's no soaked grass and more traction there. Elmer cut crossways and hit asphalt. His flapping raincoat slowed him down. He gained ground, lost ground, gained ground. He aimed at Tommy's back and popped three rounds. Muzzle flash turned the rain red. Tommy gained ground. Mike and Dick fired--back there, long-distance. Shots ricocheted off front porches. Tommy ran east on 26th. Elmer caught a sideways look and emptied his clip. The flare messed with his eyes and made little halos. Elmer ran east. He reloaded and sprinted. His raincoat slipped off. Window shades went up. He got some sight-in light. He gained ground. His wind faltered. Something dropped from Tommy's pants pocket. He stopped and aimed tight. He had him, he had him, something said DON'T. He squeezed three shots wide on purpose. Tommy cut north. He's a Human Fly. He's a fleet-foot rape-o. Watch him vamoose. Elmer heard Mike and Dick, way back there. Shots bounced off the street. Them dumbfucks blasted will-o'-the-wisps. Elmer stopped and caught some breath. He walked east and checked the sidewalk. Tommy dropped something. Elmer saw it and picked it up. Well, now. Tommy dropped a red leather address book. *** Ellen said, "Swell New Year's." Elmer said, "I had that same thought." "I guess you're not much of a shot." "Come on. At night, in the rain?" They drove through Hollywood. Ellen flopped at the Green Gables Apartments. It adjoined Paramount and lubed early cast calls. Ellen had a second marriage going. Two husbands and a kid at age twenty-seven. Her hubby was off with the Air Corps. She serviced Elmer's clients out of ennui. She serviced Elmer, likewise. Elmer hit Melrose, westbound. Call it Aquacade by Night. Muted streetlamps. The blackout and curb-high floodwater. Ellen lit a cigarette. "He pulled out his pecker and waved it. That's when I screamed." Elmer yocked. Ellen wagged a pinkie. Tommy Glennon--hung like a cashew. Elmer yocked anew. Ellen groped his trouser pockets and extracted his roll. She peeled off a fifty and stuffed the roll back. "That felt nice." "Not tonight. The weekend, maybe." "I've got late duty. My bodyguard gig with Hideo Ashida." Ellen said, "He's cute, for a Jap. Do you think he's queer?" "Come on. He's the best forensic chemist in this white man's PD." Ellen tossed her cigarette. "Tell Jack Horrall thanks for the fifty, and tell him no more bait jobs for this little black duck." "Anything else?" "Tell him I said you should go back in the Marines. There's a war on, and you should be fighting it, like my husband." Elmer said, "Do you love me?" Ellen said, "No. You're just my wartime diversion." *** Ellen scrammed at the Gables. Elmer U-turned and booked east. This nutty brainstorm percolated. His short hairs prickled on overdrive. Tommy G. lived at the Gordon Hotel. Breuning and Carlisle were too lazy to go toss it. The Gordon was straight up Melrose. Let's prowl Tommy's room. Let's sniff leads. Let's get some buy-back on that fuckup. Let's mess with Dudley Smith. The Dudster gored his goat. Hey, Elmer--toast this guy. That don't sit right. He ain't no black-robe killer. The goddamn rain. Backed-up sewers. Mud slides. No hot toddies, no swell women. Elmer parked upside the Gordon and puddle-jumped in. The lobby was threadbare. A clerk dozed by the switchboard. He wore a green felt leprechaun hat. Tommy rented 216. Elmer walked upstairs and braced the door. He caught zero voices and no radio warble. He pulled his piece and shoulder-popped the jamb. No Tommy. No nobody. Just this flop. Just this twelve-by-twelve den of despair. No bathroom. One closet. A milk-bottle pissoir by the bed. No chairs. One closet, one chest of drawers. Elmer locked himself in. Thunder shook the whole building. Geeks yelled "Happy New Year!" out on Melrose. He checked the closet. It contained nada. That meant Tommy lammed. He had a car or stole a car. He traded shots with three cops and vamoosed. Farewell, you rape-o cocksucker. Elmer tossed the drawers. He caught some provocative shit. A teach-yourself-Spanish book. A smut-photo book. Spicy donkey-show pix, à la Tijuana. Note the porkpie hat on El Burro. Nazi armbands. Jap flags. One tattoo stencil. Note the excised parts: Outlines for swastikas. Outlines for an "SQ" circumscribed by coiled snakes. Elmer thumbed Tommy's address book. More odd shit accrued. Look--there's no addresses and no full names. Look--a "J.S." and a Hollywood exchange. "St. Vib's" and a downtown exchange. It's probably St. Vibiana's catholic church. Look--RE-8761. No names or initials. Republic's a south-of-downtown exchange. Look--MA-4993. That number's familiar. He scoured his brain and snagged it. Eddie Leng's Kowloon. A Chinatown slop chute. It's open-all-nite. It features tasty shark-fin soup. Eddie Leng was a Four Families tong geek. Tommy G. was a known tong associate. Plus: three more no name/no initial numbers. Elmer grabbed the wall phone and roused the switchboard geek. Get me MA-6884, pronto. The Detective Bureau. The Vice Squad night line. It was manned round the clock. He got four rings and a pick up. He heard noisemaker squeal. The clerk came off blotto. "Uh. . . yeah?" "Rise and shine, dipshit. You got phone numbers to run." The clerk yawned. "That you, Elmer?" "It's me, so grab your pencil." "I got it here someplace." Elmer said, "HO-4612. The subscriber's got the initials J.S." "Okay, I got--" "The number for St. Vibiana's Church, and the subscriber name for RE-8761." The clerk perked up. "I know that last number. It's a hot-box pay phone, and them farkakte phone-probe Feds been looking at it. A lot of hinky City Hall guys make their hinky calls from there." Elmer said, "Don't stop now." "Who's stopping? I was just pausing." "Come on. Don't string this--" "It used to be a bookie's hot-box, and the drift is it still is. It's over on 11th and Broadway, by the Herald. That farkakte reporter Sid Hudgens stiffs his unkosher calls from it." Sid the Yid. Scandal scribe, putz provocateur. St. Vib's-- the papist hot spot. Eddie Leng's eatery. Tommy, what does this shit portend? Excerpted from This Storm: A Novel by James Ellroy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
